These exhibitions are generously funded in part by Felvis Foundation/David R. Graham.

from the tipi project • Christie BlizardJohn M. O’Quinn Gallery

Christie Blizard

Christie Blizard documents her life through her work focusing around the flexibility of identity, public interaction, and responding to the special landscape of a given space or surface. Working in a variety of media, the idea of “neti-neti” or “not this not that,” a Sanskrit expression for the sacred is her great motivator.

For the exhibition at Lawndale, Blizard has made works from the Tipi Project, which is an on-going investigation into the ideas of living in one’s work, fulfilling childhood ambitions, and personal culture as a collage process. In this project, the tipis function as dwellings, points of contact, and spatial markings as they are lived in, positioned, and documented. This exhibition will feature works from the Reykjavik Tipis, Trip to Waller, and the River and Meditation experiments.

Debra Barrera and Norberto Gomez, Jr. participate with the viewer in opposite formats to create a convergence of ideas that are rooted in the investigation of manipulating the passage of time through their respective mediums and influences. Norberto Gomez Jr. critiques and reveres his friendships and acquaintances through time-based mediums by utilizing chat rooms, film, and drawings. Interactive exhibits and projected film will replicate for the viewer a sense of acquaintanceship with Norberto himself in real time. Debra Barrera turns toward time based mediums like the Hollywood film, music, and performance to influence her sculptures and drawings. Although seemingly timeless in their appearance, Debra investigates how static objects can be imbued with the essence of the passage of time.

Darcy Rosenberger utilizes the medium of the gift throughout her work to explore and express the innumerable forms of love. The exhibition This is for You displays things that were made for very specific people, to capture the beauty of these fleeting individuals, experiences, and relationships as well as the blindingly beautiful qualities of the present. A wide range of media is employed to make very personal, almost secret, communications to particular people with the hopes of connecting to the greater public through their own storehouses of personal experiences and relationships. Physical, visual, tangible communication that is so highly personalized as this gift-based work is something that is easily lost in our increasingly impersonal and virtual-based society. This tradition of artifactual human connection needs to be pushed to stay alive.

Ballast/Break is an exhibition of prints, sculpture, and installation work by Alexis Granwell and Carrie Scanga. The work is based on the forms, structures, conduits, and patinas of cityscapes and the human-built environment. Granwell delves into the city’s grit and substance by incorporating handmade paper, found objects, and raw materials to create sculptures that evoke primitive architecture or landscapes under construction. Her oversized etchings depict similar forms that contain both a physicality and a diagrammatic quality, while Scanga’s massive, apparently floating structure of paper bricks subverts this materiality.

Curt Gambetta’s work in light is sited around spaces and objects that oscillate between urban dereliction and zones of speculation and potential development. Gambetta constructs lighting conditions that register either as a ghost of what lies neglected and erased, or a mirage of what might come. The installation, Office Light, is comprised of a 2x4’office ceiling grid containing 12 fluorescent troffer lights that illuminate the empty space behind Lawndale Art Center. All architectural presence is stripped away and remains only as a trace, reducing office light to its purest form of transmission. The ceiling hangs just below eye-level, disallowing pedestrian access and suggesting that it be viewed from afar, from the vantage point of the street. All aspects of construction are standardized technologies that are used in this installation in order to be easily re-constructed at other sites, within and outside Houston. In this way, the project is designed as a prototype for future illuminations.